It’s easy to forget how you made a book after you make it. It’s like it happened in a dream, by some other person. It took hours and hours (years and years)—but how, exactly, did it come to be?
For this reason, I’m trying to record the process of writing this new novel. I want to remember it, if only so that, next time around, when it’s challenging or easy, I can know for sure that I’ve been here before.
I started writing this book in earnest in January. I had about 70 pages by then, but I wasn’t writing regularly. When the new year began I committed to working on it five mornings a week, with two residencies (one four days long, one eight) scheduled in there too. By June I had 200 pages. I took the summer off and in August, I printed out the manuscript and read it.
Or I tried to. I was too horrified to keep going. It was so pointless and boring!
I asked Patrick to read what I’d printed out and report back: was this book worth working on, or should I just quit? Well, he’s a nice husband so he did me this favor. His verdict? I should not give up.
I think he meant it?
I chose to believe him because he agreed with me about what wasn’t working. (I still laugh about him saying something like, “Stop it with your old tricks, Edan. How many birth scenes do you have to write?” A LOT, OKAY?!)
Patrick had a brilliant revision suggestion, related to structure, which inspired me to return to the manuscript. It’s too in the weeds to explain the suggestion here, but this is all to say that since early September I’ve been revising those 200 pages. It’s one of those surgery revisions: cut here, move what’s here over there, add a little bit to that, and so on.
It’s been going pretty well since September. Last week, however, I hit a wall. I wasn’t feeling the book and I didn’t know why. It felt…inert. It felt…boring. It felt…meh.
Instead of giving up and doing something—anything!—else, I decided to do what I call fake writing.
It’s fake because it feels sort of like a performance of writing: like, it’s what someone might do in a movie montage about a novelist. Nevertheless, I’m always surprised by how useful it is.
Read on to hear all about it and get my super fun writing prompt. (Okay, okay, fun is relative…)